Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a cooking pot, and more particularly to a cooking pot for dry-cooking, wherein the heat from the heat source is transferred for dry-cooking the food though the thermal conduction of the cooking pot and the thermal convection.
Description of Related Arts
Cooking pots are one type of cookware commonly found in a kitchen. The cooking pot is made of heat conductive material to transfer heat from a bottom surface to an interior cooking surface when the bottom surface of the cooking pot is placed on top of a heat source, such as a gas heater and an electric heater. For minimizing the heat loss of the cooking pot, the size of the bottom surface of the conventional cooking pot should be larger than the size of the heat generating surface from the heat source. In other words, the bottom surface of the conventional cooking pot should cover the heat generating surface from the heat source. Generally speaking, a mid-portion of the bottom surface of the conventional cooking pot will be heated first by the heat source, and the heat from the mid-portion of the bottom surface will be radially dissipated to the peripheral-portion of the bottom surface. In other words, the temperature at the center portion of the conventional cooking pot will be extremely higher than the temperature at the peripheral portion during cooking.
One of the common cooking methods is a food boiling method by using the cooking pot is to fill a predetermined amount of fluid, such as soup or water, as a heat transferring medium in the cooking pot. For example, the cooking pot is filled with water for boiling the liquid therein. In such a manner, the heat generated by the heat source can be conducted through the bottom surface of the cooking pot to the water so as to cook the foods in the water. It is worth mentioning that since the heat from the heat source will boil the water first, the heat can be evenly dissipated through the water in the cooking pot.
Another cooking method is dry cooking. In the dry cooking method, the food is cooked with a relatively less amount of water. Sometimes, the food is cooked in a waterless manner in such dry cooking method. The main concept of this dry cooking method is to directly transfer the heat from the heat source to the food through the conductive material of the cooking pot. In other words, the food will be cooked through the direct contact of the cooking surface of the cooking pot. In other words, the food is cooked by the heat conductive ability of cooking pot while the heat conductive ability will be dramatically affected by the structure of the cooking pot.
However, in the dry cooking process, the conventional cooking pot has several drawbacks. A major drawback of the conventional cooking pot is that the cooking pot provides an unevenly heating conductive ability. In other words, the food cooking within the conventional cooking pot is easy to be over-burnt after the less amount of water is evaporated. Owing to that the cooking surface of the conventional cooking pot is larger than the heat generating surface from the heat source, the temperature of the mid-portion of the bottom surface of the cooking pot is higher than the temperature of the peripheral portion thereof. Therefore, the foods placed at the mid-portion of the bottom surface of the cooking pot are rapidly cooked. But, at the same time, the foods placed at the peripheral portion of the bottom surface of the cooking pot will not be cooked yet. In other words, the foods placed at the center of the cooking pot are easily scorched.
Furthermore, each conventional cooking pot can only provide one single cooking method. When the user uses one cooking pot for cooking the food by boiling method, the same cooking pot cannot be used for cooking different foods via another cooking method such as dry cooking method. It will be time-consuming when the users want to cook different foods via different cooking methods at the same time by using the same cooking pot. It will be a waste of gas to cook different foods by using different cooking pots.